Douglas Kell wrote:
>Nowadays of course the main start point for someone getting up to
>speed on a topic is not the large, daunting, mixed-quality and
>diffuse literature.... but the Internet. So typing 'metabolic
>control' into my preferred search engine (FAST - via
>http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/home.htm#search ) gets a good entree to
>the core MCA literature on the Web. However, 'Metabolic regulation',
>'metabolic modeling [or modelling]' and 'metabolic flux' get next to
>nothing of said core (though the first does get Stefan's home page).
>Conclusion: authors of Web pages wishing to proselytise MCA need to
>stick all the other key phrases into their html, even if only as
>comments, so the search engines pick them up. (Yes, I know,....I'll
>get round to it.....)
>Unfortunately I don't think it's as easy as that, as it depends on the
vagaries of how the search engines compile and access their databases.
If you go to the first URL on the FAST list produced by searching for
"metabolic regulation", i.e. to
http://www.bact.wisc.edu/Bact303/Regulation, and ask the browser to find
the text "metabolic regulation" it will say "The text 'metabolic
regulation' was not found", and if you view the source you'll find this
text isn't there either (i.e. it's not there as a comment or in a meta
field). On the other hand some pages that do have "metabolic regulation" in
a meta field (such as mine at http://ir2lcb.cnrs-mrs.fr/~athel/mcainfo.htm)
rank much lower, at No. 73 in this case, i.e. below pages that deal with
such things as William S. Burroughs's views on drug addiction, and ones
that tell you stuff like "Interestingly, the marriage of ascorbate with
quercitin packs its own therapeutic punch". I think we are still some way
away from intelligent search engines.
athel
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.frhttp://ir2lcb.cnrs-mrs.fr/~athel/homepage.htm
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